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Why can't those things be social media?
Because the phrase 'social media' was coined to describe a very specific thing: people who know each other in real life communicating online about things happening to them in real life. There were and are plenty of other words you can use to accurately describe other things, like 'chat room', 'forum', or 'link aggregator'.
If this subject interests you, and you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
There is also a book called Infinite Jest that touches on this subject Its a breezy novella you can finish over a lunch break
This article has struck a nerve in the comment section. It's describing how traditional social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are not used for social features anymore, but for content discovery. The descriptions of how people are using Facebook to find new content anonymously are not that different from how we use Hacker News, which has reignited the debate about whether Hacker News is social media. I had to…
Hacker News is certainly addictive. As I've started to limit my interactions on other sites like Instagram and X by removing the apps from my phone, I've seen I spend more time on this site than I did before. The content is a lot more interesting and relevant to me, so I don't see it as a problem (Yet) but I don't think that'll always be the case. I feel that this is one of the consequences of spending so much time o…
In old-style forums, BBSes and chats, there was at least a premise that you were talking to specific other persons: Yes, you started a new thread by shouting into the void, but if you got replies, the "from who" was sometimes just as interesting as the "what". If you stuck around long enough, you could recognize regulars and understand the structure of the community - maybe even get to know some people.
This kind of social network still exists, but has been joined by a different kind, where you still can hold conversations - but it's been completely deemphasized with whom your holding that conversation. Instead, the platform provides technical helpers such as tree or DAG views and up/downvotes to let you follow the structure of the discussion and get feedback without needing to track who you are talking to.
HN and Reddit do this, with *chan sites having driven it to an extreme where usernames have become completely optional.
It's basically online discussion completely abstracted to "content".
It still feels surprisingly rewarding (otherwise I wouldn't do it) but is also weird if you think about it.
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Calling this out as the primary reason HN is not social media. Forums existed for years before social media was ever a thing. HN is indistinguishable from a forum in the early 2000s.
The fact that they intentionally include a rightthing/wrongthink button and keep score is a fundamental difference between modern "social media" and legacy BBSes and forums where there was no score keeping. Perhaps keeping score of rightthink is not enough to make HN social media, but it's certainly enough to not put it in the same bucket as forums and BBSes
HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum. You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to Facebook’s reality TV, but even “documentaries” can be dopamine sinks that aren’t actually informative (or accurate). (But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here, documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so I’d hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the…
No!
Social media is where one shares ones social life. It's in the name!
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HN is absolutely social media in all senses of the word and meets your definition of cable TV pretty well -- it's a news blog run by a startup incubator as a way to increase discussion and submarine in their concept and products. "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" and that is just as true here as anywhere.
I agree half way. While recent years HN seems to have imported much of Reddit, it still has an anti-establishment undertone and decent moderation to keep it from sprawling
we'll see if that continues; bots are just as prominent here as anywhere
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I've effectively dropped reddit because they've made the mobile web version near-unusable (and I find old.reddit.com difficult on mobile). Honestly, it's an improvement in my life. I don't know how I found myself spending so much time on it for so little benefit
yeah same. old.reddit still works okay sometimes but it is annoying for regular use the mobile options are terrible. happy to be done w/ it tbh.